Vintage 1950s Planters Mr. Peanut Figural Whistle 🥜 NOS Advertising Collectible Red & Beige Plastic Figure Top Hat Monocle

Can You Whistle With Mr. Peanut? 🥜 Vintage 1950s Planters Figural Whistle, NOS, Red & Beige

Size: 2 1/2" x 1" ~ New old stock, never used.

🥜 The Whistle

In January 2020 Planters killed off Mr. Peanut in a Super Bowl ad, and in Suffolk, Virginia — the town where a 14-year-old schoolboy first drew him back in 1916 — fans built him a little shrine. He didn't stay dead. This whistle is that same dapper little peanut man from decades earlier, small enough for a kid to carry in a pocket and blow: top hat, monocle, one hand on his hip and the other on a cane, standing on a little rectangular base, his body textured like a peanut shell. Mr. is molded on the crown of the hat and PEANUT right across the band. You blow into the open crown of the hat; there's an oval opening cut into the back of his head behind the face. I have it in red and in beige — the beige is the harder of the two to find.

🎩 A Prize You Sent Away For

A 1957 railroad employee magazine has children saving up Planters peanut bags so they could send off for a "Peanut Pencil," and "maybe some day even a Peanut Whistle" — this whistle's own premium, a send-away prize rather than a store giveaway, in the 1950s and on into the '60s.

🌍 A Boy From Oderzo

Amedeo Obici was born July 15, 1877, in Oderzo, Italy, and came to America in March 1889, bound for Scranton, Pennsylvania, but ended up in Wilkes-Barre instead. He worked in the Musante family's fruit store, built a peanut roaster out of scrapyard parts, and put one letter of his last name into each bag of peanuts he sold — the lucky bags that spelled it out won an Ingersoll watch. In 1897 he partnered with Mario Peruzzi, who'd worked out his own method for blanching whole roasted peanuts, and in 1906 the two founded the Planters Peanut Company in Wilkes-Barre.

🎩 Five Dollars and a Monocle

In 1916 Planters ran a contest for a company trademark, and a 14-year-old Suffolk, Virginia schoolboy named Antonio Gentile won it with a drawing of a peanut with arms and legs, walking with a cane. His family got five dollars. Somebody then added the monocle, the top hat and the gloves — usually credited to commercial artist Andrew S. Wallach, though the credit is disputed in favor of Frank P. Krize Sr., a Wilkes-Barre artist who ran the Suffolk plant. Obici thought five dollars wasn't enough: he put Antonio and four of his siblings through college, and paid for Antonio's medical school besides. Antonio Gentile became a doctor in Newport News, Virginia, and died of a heart attack in 1939. His drawing went a long way. By the mid-1930s Mr. Peanut stood for the whole peanut industry, not just Planters, and he's still one of the best-known characters advertising ever made. When Advertising Week opened the Madison Avenue Walk of Fame in 2004, he was one of the first five in, third behind the red and yellow M&M's and the Aflac Duck and ahead of the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger. Not bad for a five-dollar sketch.

🥜 Wilkes-Barre and Suffolk

For nearly half a century Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania was the peanut capital of the world — Planters' headquarters sat off Public Square on East Market Street, and every summer an eight-foot Mr. Peanut walked the shopping district handing out roasted peanuts to children, while smaller Mr. Peanut figures rode the big grinders in the store window. By 1913 the company had opened its Suffolk, Virginia plant, which grew into the largest peanut-processing operation in the world; Obici and his wife Louise moved to Suffolk in 1924 and bought Bay Point Farm on the Nansemond River. Louise died in 1938, and Obici endowed a hospital in her memory before his own death in 1947; the hospital opened in 1951, and Bay Point Farm is Sleepy Hole Golf Course today. A full-color Mr. Peanut statue has stood on a granite pedestal in downtown Suffolk since 1991 — where the flowers and candles went in January 2020.

🎡 The Boardwalk

Mr. Peanut began walking the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1930, and a store selling the five-cent "Nickel Lunch" opened across from the Steel Pier. The manager's son, Leo Yeager III, opened his own Mr. Peanut shop at 10th Street on the Ocean City, New Jersey boardwalk in 1972 — it's still there — and he now holds some 25,000 pieces of Mr. Peanut merchandise. The Atlantic City store closed in 1978.

🪦 RIP 1916–2020

Planters itself changed hands over the years — Standard Brands bought roughly half the company in 1960 for $12 million, Standard Brands merged into Nabisco in 1981, Kraft acquired Nabisco in 2000, and Hormel bought Planters in 2021 for $3.35 billion. On January 22, 2020, Planters announced that Mr. Peanut had died, in a campaign built around Super Bowl LIV. Baby Nut sprouted from the grave with the line "Just kidding, I'm back," grew into Peanut Jr. that August, and by February 2021 the grown-up Mr. Peanut was back in his top hat and monocle, same as they've been since 1916.